May 23, 2007
Dear Everyone:
Regarding my stock options from last week, if I had
waited until Friday, I might have gained another $300.
But “a bird in the hand…”
The check arrived on Monday and I took it to the Credit Union on
Tuesday. My savings account
shows a very healthy-looking balance for a change.
I think I’ll “let it lie” for a few weeks.
At least until after we get back from
In other news…
Two weeks ago I was in “Sugarland” (“Hobby”), attending a week-long workshop on the Enterprise File Plan (EFP). “Sugarland” is actually a completely separate city, but it is surrounded on all sides by the city of “Hobby”, which sort of grew up around “Sugarland”, rather like The Blob, absorbing anything in its path.
The EFP is just a part of a much larger project called “Global Information Link 3” (GIL3). Since this is a project, although it will go on for years, there is a tendency to hire contractors (temporary workers) instead of full-time employees.
The company had hired one of those consulting companies that have lots of “professional project managers” and “professional business analysts”. (This is not to suggest that these contractors are anything but professional; I’m just not sure which sets of initials goes with which contractors.) So we have lots of these contractors on the teams.
One thing this particular contractor wanted to do was focus not on what people file, but rather on what they do. The EFP needed to be organizationally neutral. The top level of the File Plan was designated “Functional Area”. Below each Functional Area would be a Primary Activity. There might be a further breakdown into a Secondary Activity. And so on.
So it was emphasized that each Primary Activity needed to begin with an active verb. Thus, instead of “Acquisitions and Divestitures” and Primary Activity might be designated “Acquire Properties”. Trouble is when you get into a lot of the “nuts and bolts”, like Joint Ventures. That became “Manage Joint Ventures” or “Maintain Contracts and Agreements.”
Before you know it, almost all your Primary Activities begin with “Maintain” or “Manage”. Problem is, both manage and maintain are such vague references that they can mean just about anything. In fact, in my last Business Analysis class, we had an exercise in which we kept going back to the instructor to ask, “What does manage mean in this context? How is it different from maintain?” The Instructors confessed that they had deliberately used those verbs precisely because they are so vague.
So, lots of Primary Activities starting with the letter “M” and some grumbling about how people are going to find things when they’re looking for a noun instead of a verb. On that Friday, the subject came up again. Why not resort the File Plan alphabetically so people could see how things would fall out?
The reason why not is that the File Plan was really a very large and complicated spreadsheet that couldn’t be resorted without losing a great deal of very important information. That’s when I volunteered to perform the resort.
I had no intention of doing it in a spreadsheet. Instead, I started a folder in Windows Explorer for each Functional Area. Under these folders, I created sub-folders for each Primary Activity. Then I created sub-folders for the Secondary Activities. Then I created sub-sub-folders for the “Information Types”. And finally, I created text documents for each of the examples given in the File Plan.
This took quite a lot of time over that weekend. But it didn’t take up a lot of space because, as far as Windows was concerned, it was just a lot of empty folders. By the time I got back into work on Tuesday, 5/15/07, I was ready to replicate the whole File Plan into a new space, then take out all those leading verbs to see how the FP would look when Windows resorted everything by name (because that’s what computers do.)
However, I found out that morning that the two team leaders had completely rearranged the entire File Plan. Nothing was where it was the Friday before. In fact, they continued to rearrange and re-rearrange, sometimes taking something out of one place, putting it in another, then putting it back where it started, right up until the absolute deadline of last Thursday.
Then they declared that version to be the “Released 1.0” version. By Friday, they already had a newer “unreleased” version of 1.5. However, the File Plan hasn’t been updated since 5/18/07.
So this week, I’ve been trying to figure out where everything in my “virtual” file plan (vfp) goes according to the most recent version. As near as I can tell, they took the Enterprise File Plan and fed it through a chipper. Almost nothing is where it was. I can see where things are now, but not always where they came from.
I finally loaded up two copies of the FP, one “pre-chipper” and one “post-chipper”. I find an Information Type in the post-chipper, then search for it in pre-chipper to figure out where it is in my vfp. Then I find it in Windows and move it to the post-chipper location.
I expect I’ll have it all squared away by the end of this week. (They seem to have eliminated “Hardiness, Ecology and Theft Avoidance”. I can tell you that this company cares very much about Hardiness, Ecology and Theft Avoidance, so it has to be somewhere.)
And so it goes…
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |